Friday, March 25, 2011

The Art of Word Choosing

In 2000, after a picture of an Israeli soldier was wrongly captioned, painting Israel in a very negative light, the website Honestreporting.com was created. According to their website, Honest Reporting aims to "monitor the media, expose cases of bias, promote balance, and effect change to ensure Israel is represented fairly and accurately." Although I agree with their views and opinions, I wonder if they can really claim honesty and accuracy when they are outright pro-Israel. Maybe they can claim it, but does the general public believe it?

Recently, Honest Reporting called out Reuters for "redefining" terrorism. The Reuters report on the terrorist attack in Israel on Wednesday afternoon claimed that a terrorist attack is "Israel's term for a Palestinian strike." A STRIKE?! This is a criminal act! Israel knows strikes; its workers go on strike all the time. In fact, right now there is a social worker strike. Social workers are refusing to work until they get better employment conditions. Despite this, the social workers strike has allowed social workers to do their job twice since the strike began over 3 weeks ago: after the Itamar attack and now, after the bus stop bombing.

A strike definitely does not accurately describe what Terrorism is, and a bomb planted near a busy bus stop is nothing short of an attack.

Like we spoke about in class, and came up with CNN's report on the Itamar attack as well, the words writers/editors use are carefully chosen to evoke certain images and emotions in the reader and this influences the reader's opinion on the matter. Clearly, Reuters chose this word on purpose. We need to continue fighting media bias and call for accurate claims and descriptions of events like these. I wonder if there are similar organizations to HonestReporting that call out these articles and reports that unfairly portray one side of the situation. I guess this is what many bloggers try to do. It is our responsibility, as individuals, to call for factual accuracy and fair portrayal of all people and nations.

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